What does the Higgs field do?
The Higgs field is the settled background every particle is maintained against, and it gives the W and Z particles their mass. Repair, the step where neighboring observers settle disagreements, leaves a least informative state everything returns to. Read as a field, that reference picks out a direction for the weak force, with a stiffness of 246 billion electron-volts. Three of the four electroweak force carriers turn the reference when they ripple, so they drag it along, and dragging is a standing cost, which is mass. The combination that leaves the reference alone is light, so the photon is massless. A ripple in the reference's size is the Higgs boson, found at CERN in 2012 near 125 billion electron-volts. Why the reference settles where it does, and how strongly it couples to matter, is work in progress.
Also in Chapter 30: Why Do the Masses Land Where They Do?, Chapter 31: What Is a Lagrangian, and Why Is It the Last Thing?.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 28: What Is a Particle, What Is a Wave, and Why Does It Look Like Both?watch a universe make its own particles